At 21:49 99/10/12 -0700, John Boyer wrote:
>Originally, I had thought that an empty Location (or one that starts with a
># fragment if we allow fragments in Location) should mean 'this' document.
John, the typical way of referring to "this document" is
<a href="">this document</a>
This is why fragment IDs are interprated the way they are when no URI
precedes them. [1]
I believe people are speaking of what happens when you don't provide the
location element itself, then assume it is implicit to the context.
This must also be distinguished from what happens when you have a location
element but no attribute, did the DTD define a default attribute value?
In order to keep some grasp on all this optionality, I'd prefer we have
don't specify lots of optionality in the natural language nor that we rely
upon XML/DTD attribute definition defaults.
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[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt
4.2. Same-document References
A URI reference that does not contain a URI is a reference to the
current document. In other words, an empty URI reference within a
document is interpreted as a reference to the start of that document,
and a reference containing only a fragment identifier is a reference
to the identified fragment of that document. Traversal of such a
reference should not result in an additional retrieval action.
However, if the URI reference occurs in a context that is always
intended to result in a new request, as in the case of HTML's FORM
element, then an empty URI reference represents the base URI of the
current document and should be replaced by that URI when transformed
into a request.
_________________________________________________________
Joseph Reagle Jr.
Policy Analyst mailto:reagle@w3.org
XML-Signature Co-Chair http://w3.org/People/Reagle/